The Edge
by soiheard
Summary: Cassie finds she can see the future a lot more clearly through the bottom of a bottle. Takes place approx. 6 months after the movie.
1. Introduction

I fell back in love with Push fanfiction. This story picks up roughly six months after the movie. At the end of the movie, Cassie and Nick had the drug and Kira had killed Carver with the help of Nick's note. This chapter is more of an introduction than anything - the story will start up in the next part, if anyone's interested.

Let me know what you think.

* * *

"**My mom drinks when she wants to get really clear images. She's famous for it."**

Charlie Dane was not a petty criminal. He wanted to make sure that this Cassie Holmes girl knew that straight away, which was why she currently had three guns trained on her.

Three red sniper dots danced on her lapel, right over her heart. She looked down and cocked her head.

"Those guys aren't very good, you know."

Dane rolled a cufflink coolly between his fingers. "Excuse me?"

"Your snipers – they're not very good."

The man calmly dragged up a crate and sat down. "Go on."

Cassie reached into her coat – the red dots quivered warily - and pulled out her sketchbook. She lifted it up so the first page was showing; not only to Dane, but to the three hidden snipers.

"The one on the left is too nervous to even hit my shoulder. If I try anything, and he shoots and misses, then you'll shoot _him _later." She turned the page and tapped a rather gruesome image with her forefinger. "See?"

One of the dots disappeared. Cassie smiled to herself.

Dane grinned, his top lip stretching over a crooked line of nicotine-yellow teeth. "And what about the other two?"

Cassius licked her fingertip and turned the page, before lifting it up once more. "The police are about to activate the two tracking devices they slipped into their jacket pockets earlier. You're not stupid, so it looks like you're going to send them to another part of town to distract them."

She watched the other two red dots drop from her chest as the two snipers presumably began patting down their pockets. She tapped her drawing; a white chalk picture of a getaway car with two stickmen visible in the front seats.

Dane bowed his head slightly. "I guess I should thank you for the warning."

In the distance, two car doors slammed and en engine blared.

Cassie flicked her sketchbook closed and sat down. "There we go. Now what do you need?"

"A way out." He ran his fingers through his lank hair. "A friend of mine told you gave him a six month plan to stay out the spotlight. I need the same. Eight months, if you can –"

"- I can't." Cassie's face hardened. "How much for the six?"

"That depends how good the plan is. I daresay it's enough to buy you a roof over your head. And your family, too."

Cassie narrowed her eyes. "No, just me."

Dane looked her up and down, alarmed. "You're on your own? _Shit..._"

"That's not really any of your concern, is it? What _is_ your concern are the police that are going to raid your apartment in five minutes. They'll find a green safe. Sound familiar?"

Dane sat bolt upright. "Will they open it?"

Cassie's face crumpled with concentration. "Give me a sec." She reached into her pocket, pulled out a minibar-measure of vodka and downed it in one. "...yes."

She opened a fresh page of her notebook and a retrieved a worn-down pencil from her pocket. It darted across the page until there was a rather slapdash picture of a mobile phone with Sara on the call list.

"You're going to ring Sara and tell her you're going to New York airport."

Dane fumbled for his phone. Cassie smiled, the corners of her closed eyes wrinkling.

"But you're really going to go to JFK. Sara's working with the police."

Dane clenched his jaw. "Of course. And after that?"

"You're going to book a ticket. I can't figure out where because you keep changing your mind, but it'll cost... three-thousand dollars."

She tore off another page and handed it to him. It was a drawing of several hundred dollar bills.

"There'll be someone waiting for you at the gate. You can trust them."

Dane frowned impatiently. "A bit vague, don't you think?"

"That's all I can get," Cassie snapped. "Future you clearly doesn't want to be Watched, so you keep changing your mind. Good tactic."

She stood up and held out her hand.

"You expect me to pay for _that_?" Dane shook his head. "You'll get half."

Cassie shrugged. "Whatever. Good luck." She snatched a rather disappointing wad of money from his grubby hand and walked away, swaying unsteadily as she did so. It took her a moment or two to find her pocket, and once she had she buried the cash deep inside.

She kept her head down as she turned the corner, walking straight into the solid chest of an undercover policeman.

She only glanced up for a moment. "Hey."

"Where's he headed? I have three cars waiting to go after him." He pulled a substantial wad of notes from his pocket.

"Be at JFK, gate 9, in half an hour."

"Thanks." The officer fumbled with a walkie-talkie and began to back away. "Watch yourself, Cassie."

Cassie grunted a goodbye and leaned into the shadows.

It wasn't _herself_ she needed to watch, after all.

It was someone that had disappeared from her visions, intentionally or otherwise – someone that had made her a promise and had let it go sour.

Nick.


	2. Chapter 2

**Further A/N: **I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and it's pretty brief, but I'm just going to post it to sort of establish where Nick is right now in the story. It's REALLY short, but as I said, I'm hoping by getting it out there it'll help me get my footing again.

**A/N: **Thanks for the reviews so far. I've just read that first chapter back and it seems so bare and slapdash, but as I said, it's just a scene-setter. I probably _didn't_ say that, but let's just pretend I did. If you like this one, let me know in a review or a message. If you don't... well, still do. Heh.

**Chapter 2**

The motel room was almost silent but for the sickly drip-drip of the broken faucet. After a few minutes – maybe ten, but time seemed to slip away in rooms like these – even that had stopped, and the room was plunged into eerie quiet.

And then, with a sudden thud, Pinky slammed an incomplete fist down on the table, his face crumpling. "For Christ's sake. Nick, I told you I can't do Watchers –"

"What?" Nick's head appeared around the bathroom door, a toothbrush hanging limply from his mouth. "I never asked you to Shade us from Watchers. Just Sniffs – you know, necessary precautions."

"Well Division is _clearly_ trying to work round those precautions," Pinky hissed, his fist unfurling. "Unless..."

"Unless what?"

Pinky's face twisted uncomfortably. "There _is_ a Watcher we're forgetting about here."

Nick's jaw clenched. "Cassie won't be Watching us."

"C'mon Nick, try and be realistic here –"

"Cassie won't be Watching us," he repeated slowly. "End of story."

Pinky reclined on his seat and shrugged. "Fair enough. You two should probably get going, though, 'cause whoever _is _Watching you knows exactly where you are."

Nick rinsed his mouth, his grip tightening around the toothbrush as he tried to exercise some restraint. "Thanks a lot, Pinky. Good job." His sarcasm was searing. "Really, really great."

Pinky shrugged again, swept up the envelope of cash from the Perspex tabletop and paused on his way out.

"I told you. I _can't _do Watchers. _Especially_," he paused, biting his tongue. "Especially Watchers as good as Cassie Holmes."


	3. Chapter 3

Thank you to the people who still look at this now and then. I had some time today so I wrote this. The earlier chapters are such a mess I'm thinking about re-posting and polishing it a bit. I found my plot notes earlier and Cassie's turned out, er... a bit darker than planned.

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**Chapter 3**

Cassie shaded in the table with a few decisive strokes. The money was there on the tabletop. On the next page, she sketched the same table. The money was gone, snatched away by a hand, tellingly missing a fifth finger.

Her drawing of the hand was crude and cartoonish, but it told her everything she needed to know. Nick was being Shadowed by Pinky who, by the looks of it, had just left. This was her chance.

She groped through the darkness for the bottle of vodka she'd lifted from the 7-Eleven around the corner. It was the cheap, nasty stuff; the sort of thing you could clean paintbrushes with. Funnily enough Cassie did just that, following some of her more artistic periods of Watching.

She poured it down her throat without so much as wincing and flicked to a new page in her notebook.

**·** **·** **·**

"Kira, we have to go."

The bedroom door rattled on its hinges as Nick rushed through, his hands a blur as their few belongings flew through the air into a backpack. "Kira, we need to go _now._"

She stirred, the discoloured duvet slipping off her shoulders. "Why?" she asked, mid-yawn. "Pinky's here, we're covered -"

"Pinky's gone," Nick said, zipping up the backpack with a single tug. "Apparently there's a Watcher after us, and he thinks it's..." he paused, shouldering the bag as Kira's face darkened. He waited a moment before he finished his sentence. "He thinks it's Cassie."

Whatever fatigue had been gripping Kira disappeared in an instant as she swung her legs out of bed, her eyes flashing fiercely as she crossed the room. "I told you we should've gotten rid of her, Nick. I told you this would happen."

"She's fourteen, Kira..."

"I don't care," she shot back distractedly, pulling a sweater over her head. "She's a pain in the ass."

Frowning, Kira pulled a handgun from beneath the pillow and shoved it beneath the waistband of her jeans. "I guess we better go, then." She stared expectantly across at Nick. He dodged her gaze, electing instead to look down at the floor.

"I'm sorry. I am. But I couldn't -"

"It doesn't matter." Kira dropped her eyes and slid open the window to her right. "Now let's go. Down the fire escape."

Nick half-smiled. "Kira, we've stayed here for days. We need to at least _pay_ the guy -"

One leg out the window, Kira glanced back with eyes that were not her own, but consumed with the all too familiar darkness of an impending Push. She smiled. "I've got it covered."

******·** **·** **·**

They were on the corner.

The drawings were coming thick and fast now. Her pencil flashed across the page. A foot on an iron ladder – a fire escape. A flickering red Motel sign in the periphery. A hand reaching out and being gripped by another. Cassie focused on the watch around its wrist.

10:16. She breathed a sigh. Now she knew they were at least in the same timezone, which narrowed down her search somewhat.

Drawing page-after-page, Cassie followed their hurried walk down the street, unable to concentrate for too long on street signs and familiar places for fear of losing them. She grimaced, the alcohol searing her throat now. Just a little bit closer.

Her vision was close behind them. Her mind twisted agonisingly as she tried desperately to close that distance, to get a closer look – Nick's head was turning now, glancing over his shoulder, and she couldn't help herself. The image became so much more detailed than the others before it – every wrinkle of apprehension on his gaunt face, every dot of stubble from months of living rough...

And then black.

Cassie's eyes refocused and she relinquished her throttling grip on the bottle of vodka and laid down her splintered pencil. It had happened again. The moment she got close enough to actually see him, just for that one second, the vision would disintegrate and slip away as if she had somehow forgotten it.

She had drank too much this time. Grumbling incoherently with frustration, Cassie still managed to neatly tear out the last drawing from her notebook and cross her small, dank room with it held carefully in her hands.

Ignoring the distraction of her pounding headache, she tacked the drawing to the wall, watching with an odd sort of satisfaction as it took its place amongst the rest. She stepped back and looked on.

The wall was covered, from one end to the other, with Nick. Some drawings were done on canvas, of that same glancing pose before everything would go black. Others were blurs of where she had Watched him a street but had been unable to See clearly. Most were scraps of paper torn from her notepad after semi-successful sessions, pinned haphazardly across the peeling magnolia wall.

Almost all of them, she noticed, were splattered with some sort of alcohol.


	4. Chapter 4

**CHAPTER 4**

**3 MONTHS EARLIER**

Cassie traced her finger lightly along the map held loosely in her hand. They hadn't been in one place for more than a day for over three months – with a long sigh, Cassie realised that _she_ hadn't been in one place for more than a day for as long as she could remember.

She set down the map on top of a stack of papers, each of them filled corner-to-corner with what appeared to be doodles. She imagined, closing her eyes for a moment, what it would be like to be _normal_ – to be at high school, doodling in the margins of her notebook, scribbling a tiny heart, filled with one name written in even tinier writing – Nick.

She shook her head and picked up the scrap on top of the pile, thumbing the blurred details her pencil hadn't been quick enough to capture as visions flashed through her untrained mind. Once again she felt that niggling feeling of inadequacy, and once again she wished that her inadequacy didn't have so high a cost. For other fourteen-year-old girls, inadequacy meant bad grades. For Cassie, it meant her mother remaining firmly in one of Division's cells for another day, week, month –

"Cassie?"

Her shoulders relaxed and slowly, her eyes opened. "Nick."

"Can I come in?"

There was something different about his voice – a waver of nervousness that caused her to turn abruptly to look at him. He was pale and shaken as he took a seat on the edge of her bare mattress, the rusty springs croaking beneath his solemn weight.

"What's up?"

Nick stared straight ahead and, wincing, replied, "I need you to leave."

Cassie's heart dropped into her stomach. "What? Why?"

He answered immediately. Her eyes welled knowing he had _rehearsed_ this – rehearsed her dismissal.

"I can't look after you anymore. I can't help you."

"But you said –"

"She's your mother, not mine." Nick's eyes finally, agonisingly, rested on hers. She almost flinched.

"OK," she said thickly, furiously swallowing her tears as she jumped up from the mattress and piled paper after paper into her backpack. "OK, fine."

"Look after yourself, Cassie." He spoke weakly, sitting deadly still amidst the chaos of Cassie's frantic packing. He raised his voice slightly. "And promise me something."

Cassie stopped. "What?"

His lips seemed to part in slow motion now, and Cassie felt herself stiffen, bracing herself against what she knew would be the final, lethal blow.

"Promise me you won't try to Watch me."

Cassie hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder, her hand shaking on the strap regardless of how desperately she was trying to stop it. Her final words were as cold as she could make them.

"Why would I?"

**PRESENT DAY **

For the thousandth time, Cassie thought over every second of that day, examining every frame of her memory while throttling the neck of a vodka bottle.

There was something wrong with their conversation, and every time she came close to pinning it down, it slipped away. She slumped back wearily against the wall, rubbing her temples and praying for some clarity.

Nick wouldn't just leave her. She knew that. He wouldn't.

She thought back again, sharpening her focus until she could see every line on his face, every crack on the walls of that run-down motel room –

And then, without any warning, something happened. A vision, so clear that she felt no need to grab for her pencil and paper, unfolded before her eyes.

Cassie Watched the past.

**THREE MONTHS EARLIER**

"_Can I come in?"_

A deep, struggling breath like that of a drowning man.

"Can I come in?"

A satisfied smile.

"_I need you to leave."_

Less struggling now – his shoulders dropped in submission.

"I need you to leave."

Her eyes – no irises, just too unmoving ovals of black – blinked slowly, calculatingly.

"_I can't look after you anymore. I can't help you. She's your mother, not mine_._"_

He repeated the words with an identical inflection.

"I can't look after you anymore. I can't help you. She's your mother, not mine."

Her hand lifted, one finger pointing at the door to Cassie's room with the insistence of an accomplished hypnotist – an accomplished Pusher.

"_Look after yourself, Cassie. And promise me something. Promise me you won't try to Watch me."_

Nick stood up from his seat and approached the door, his movements slow and unnatural, like a marionette.

"Look after yourself, Cassie. And promise me something. Promise me you won't try to Watch me."

He twisted the door handle and entered Cassie's room, taking a deep breath as he began to repeat it all to its intended audience.

Kira sat back, the whites of her eyes slowly reappearing, and smiled.


End file.
